Recently, the demand for high-speed data transmissions rises. And, OFDM, which is suitable for a scheme advantageous for the high-speed transmission, has been adopted as a transmission scheme for various high-speed communication systems. In the following description, OFDM (orthogonal frequency division multiplexing) is explained. A basic principle of OFDM lies in diving a high-rate data stream into a great number of slow-rate data streams and transmitting the slow-rate data streams simultaneously using a plurality of carriers. In this case, each of a plurality of the carriers is called a subcarrier. Since orthogonality exists between a plurality of the carriers of OFDM, even if frequency components of the carriers are mutually overlapped, they can be detected by a receiving side. The high-rate data stream is converted to a plurality of slow-rate data streams via a serial-to-parallel converter, a plurality of the parallel-converted data streams are multiplied by subcarriers, respectively, the multiplied data streams are summed up together, and the corresponding sum is then transmitted to the receiving side. So, OFDMA is a multiple access scheme to assign subcarriers to an overall band according to a data rate requested by multiple users in OFDM.
The OFDM communication scheme is to carry out signal processing smoothly in a manner of transforming a channel into flat-fading by performing signal processing in frequency domain on a channel having frequency-selective fading phenomenon. Owing to such an advantage, the OFDM communication scheme is widely used by various wireless communication systems. Yet, a problem of PAPR (peak to average power ratio) is still unsolved. The higher PAPR becomes, the larger a linear section of a power amplifier of an output end should get. A power amplifier having a large liner section is expensive in general. Yet, a cheap power amplifier is used for wire/wireless communications to reduce a product cost of terminal, whereby an output range is narrowed. So, distortion of OFDM signal is inevitable.
To solve the PAPR problem, various methods have been proposed. In this case, the various methods can be classified into PAPR reducing schemes (selective mapping, partial transmit sequence, clipping & filtering, etc.) capable of not affecting OFDM system performance and signal generating schemes (signal carrier-FDMA, offset DFT-spreading-OFDM, etc.) reducing OFDM system performance slightly or improving performance of signal itself. The PAPR enhancing method without affecting the OFDM system performance still has a problem of communication capacity reduction attributed to additional information sending. Besides, the method of changing the signal generating scheme lowers a decoding rate of data to degrade performance.
SC-FDMA (single carrier-FDMA) according to a related art is explained as follows.
First of all, the related art SC-FDMA is the scheme mainly applicable to uplink. In the SC-FDMA, spreading is first applied in a frequency domain by DFT matrix before generating an OFDM signal, the corresponding result is modulated by the related art OFDM, and the modulated result is then transmitted. FIG. 1 is a block diagram of a SC-FDMA transmitter according to a related art.
To explain the SC-FDMA scheme, several variables are defined. ‘N’ indicates a number of subcarriers carrying OFDM signal, ‘Nb’ indicates a number of subcarriers for a random user, ‘F’ indicates Discrete Fourier Transform matrix, i.e., DFT matrix, ‘s’ indicates a data symbol vector, ‘x’ indicates a data-spread vector in frequency domain, and ‘y’ indicates an OFDM symbol vector transmitted in time domain.
In SC-FDMA, data symbol (s) is spread using DFT matrix before being transmitted. This is represented as Formula 1.x=FNb×Nbs
In Formula 1, FNb×Nb is an Nb by Nb DFT matrix used to spread data symbol (s). Subcarrier mapping is performed on the spread vector (x) by a predetermined subcarrier assigning scheme and a signal to be transmitted to a receiving side is obtained from transforming the corresponding result into a time domain by IDFT module. A transmission signal transmitted to the receiving side is represented as Formula 2.y=F−1N×N 
In Formula 2, F−N×N is an N by N DFT matrix used to convert a frequency-domain signal to a time-domain signal. A cyclic prefix is inserted in a signal ‘y’ generated by the above method to be transmitted. And, a method of generating a transmission signal and transmitting the signal to a transmitting side in the above manner is called SC-FDMA.
Offset DFT spreading OFDM results from improving the SC-FDMA. The offset DFT spreading OFDM performs DFT spreading processing by dividing a data symbol through constellation mapping into a real number and an imaginary number, i.e., an inphase element and a quadrature element. Since an amplitude of each of the real and imaginary elements is Nb, the real and imaginary elements are spread using 2Nb-amplitude DFT matrix. An output amounting to a amplitude Nb is discarded from an output spread by the DFT matrix. The rest of the output amounting to the Nb amplitude is transformed into a time domain signal and is then transmitted to a receiving side.